Economics: The User's Guide

Money is a symbol of what others in your society owe you, or your claim on particular amounts of the society's resources.

How money and other financial claims... are created, sold and bought is... . ...[C]laims ...a lot of economics is (or should be) about those.

[J]argons that facilitate communication within the profession makes its communication with outsiders more difficult. ...[A]ll technical professions have an incentive to make themselves look more complicated... so they can justify the high fees... for their services.

I try to explain... how to think, rather than what to think.

[E]conomics can never be a science in the sense that physics or chemistry is. There are many different types of economic theory, each emphasizing different aspects of a complex reality, making different moral and political value judgments and drawing different conclusions. ...[E]conomic theories constantly fail to predict real-world developments... not least because human beings have... free will, unlike chemical molecules or [other] physical objects.